At 12:12 PM -0400 5/27/07, Andrew Stiller wrote:
On May 26, 2007, at 9:09 PM, John Howell wrote:
Andrew wrote:
And another thing: non-tonal and atonal are not synonyms.
I often agree with Andrew and respect his depth of knowledge, which
goes well beyond my own, and with this I can definitely agree. But
again, I read in his comments that he's referring to the use of
common-practice functional harmony and NOT simply to the presence
of absence of a tonal center.
That is correct. The reason I do so is that atonality is a highly
restricted idiom both culturally and chronologically. It is so small
a portion of the total body of human music, that to make the
dichotomy tonal/atonal on the basis you prefer is as fundamentally
silly as to divide all music into impressionist vs.
non-impressionist. Beyond that, if tonal and atonal are considered
as co-equal terms, that ironically gives to atonal music a
prominence and importance far beyond what it deserves. Finally, if
"tonal" means any music with a tonal center, than what are we to
call the harmonic idiom of 1660-1900--for which, I might add, the
adjective "tonal" was originally employed?
At least it's clear that we're using the word in very different ways,
which is useful to understand. For the common-practice period I find
that the music is overwhelmingly tonal (having tonal centers) of
course, with the harmonic idiom being that of functional harmony.
But to me that's two definitions looking at two aspects, tonal
centeredness and harmonic usage. Tonality does not require
functional harmony, and is not restricted to either major-minor
tonality nor to common-practice harmonic usage. Your mileage clearly
does differ.
I agree of course, that atonality is highly restricted culturally and
chronologically, but also feel that by far the majority of all music
of all times and all places (of which we can be aware) is tonal.
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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